Part I. The Basics

Part I provides a gentle introduction to the concepts used in software build systems. This part starts with a high-level view of the various stages of the build process, describes what a build system aims to create, shows the various input and output files used during compilation, and introduces the concepts of build targets and variants. You’ll explore these topics:

Chapter 1, “Build System Overview”: A brief tour of the major components of a build system, including a number of important definitions that you need for later chapters.

Chapter 2, “A Make-Based Build System”: A short tutorial on using the GNU Make build tool, for those who’ve never been exposed to a text-based build system.

Chapter 3, “The Runtime View of ...

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